For art's sake
Part coming-of-age memoir and popculture homage, the creative non-fiction of Megan Dunn takes the reader on a digressive, funny and unflinching journey through late-20th-century New Zealand.
Part coming-of-age memoir and pop-culture homage, the creative non-fiction of Megan Dunn takes the reader on a digressive, funny and unflinching journey through late-20thcentury New Zealand.
Megan Dunn’s follow-up to 2018’s Tinderbox is another hybrid: it’s both essay collection and memoir – and neither. That’s unsurprising, perhaps, for an artist who studied “Intermedia” at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in the 90s.
Dunn brings a buoyant iconoclasm to her creative non-fiction, resisting, in Things I Learned at Art School, the shaping that both a collection and a memoir demand.
One of the sections is called “Good Girls Write Memoirs, Bad Girls Don’t Have Time”. I call this a “section” rather than an essay, because as with many of the pieces here, it is brief.
The contents pages are profuse: this is a book of lists, odes, anecdotes and vignettes. “I don’t really know how to end this digression,” Dunn writes towards the end of “On Being a Redhead”.
Luckily, many of these pieces are funny and sharp, and if we wish some of them
were longer, it’s because their slivers of story gleam.
This book is about many things – coming of age in late-20th-century New Zealand, studying (and questioning) art, loving (and questioning) her late mother – but Dunn’s original subject was jettisoned.
For years she was absorbed by the lives of professional mermaids, but her publisher nixed the mermaid book – an “epic flop”, Dunn admits – and requested this collage memoir instead. Still, mermaids keep swimming up to the bar. Dunn’s passion for Daryl Hannah and the movie Splash began when she saw it, aged 10, at the Odeon in Rotorua, acting it out in the bathtub afterwards. As a teenager, she respliced the film for an Elam project. (“This can’t be about Daryl Hannah!” her frustrated tutor complained.)
Dunn’s Gen-X, pop-culture landmarks – from Grease to Working Girl to Twin Peaks – stud the book. Her childhood is a pink wave: Western Barbie, Cabbage Patch Kids, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Smurfs. Real life is more drab than this pastel dream, like the “brown and murky” Waikato River when Dunn and her mother spend six months in Huntly, or the sparse flat in West Auckland, or the granny flat in the “Residence for the Elderly” where her tiny bedroom is “the shape of an isosceles triangle”.
The teenage Dunn swoons over The Breakfast Club and A Room with a View, but real life never matches the dream on the screen. Instead, she and her friend Kelly “stopped buying Smurfs and started picking up men instead”. She has her “first pash” on concrete steps in a car park, “with a boy I met in the New Lynn shopping mall”.
Dunn’s parents split up when she was three, and her mother becomes her close ally and enemy. “Mum is a raging heterosexual: I get that from her. Along with her sense of humour and appetite for self-destruction.” Dunn’s mother decorates her own bedroom in every shade of purple, and falls for a guy “with a guitar and a purple van”. Its licence plate reads HOT 2 GO. “I was the one sane voice in the granny flat,” Dunn recalls. The essay on her mother’s final illness, “Art in the Waiting Room”, is one of the book’s most moving and assured.
The earlier “art” sections here are the most surreal. Dunn’s set of friends and their shows are absurd to the point of parody. Later, she finds steadier employment, tending bar at an Auckland massage parlour and then at Showgirls on K Rd, an observant outsider in the demi-monde. Although the humour in Things I Learned can be glib, Dunn is unflinching in exploring her flaws and missteps. When her father tells her, “I have reservations about your memoir” because some “things are better left unsaid”, Dunn is not deterred. She’s following Hemingway’s advice, after all, to “write one true sentence” after another.
“Mum is a raging heterosexual: I get that from her. Along with her sense of humour and appetite for self-destruction.”